Heh, I'm no Peter Ebbesen, though I was a big fan of his back in the glory days of EU2 on the Paradox forums! 8/8 seems like a better plan.

Fair enough. And yea, I have many fond memories of reading The Conqueror.

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Tried a core start, but the AI choices were One Way Doormaster and Peacemaker, so I noped right out of that game. Doable, but slogging through a black hole machine or a couple OMDs with ion cannon support on *every single system* sounds like the opposite of fun...

The BHM's wouldn't have been much of a problem once you got far enough in FS, because you wouldn't really mind the extra AIP much.

The OMDs also wouldn't have been too terribly bad, but since you'd be bringing huge targets everywhere they would have gotten annoying.

Just saying that it could have picked a lot worse

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Third start seems decent, with one glaring problem. AIs are Experimentalist and Thief.

Those are pretty mild. The experimentalist's unique ships are all honestly kind of weak nowadays, though there might be a few exceptions.

The thief can certainly be annoying, but again once you get into FS I don't think your fleet engagements are going to involve the opportunity for the AI to steal much. It's more of a "fleets mutually annihilate each other until there's only one side left" thing.

The thief starting with the Bombard is a problem, yes, but that's not inherent to the thief.

Nomads with raid engines are a thing, yes, though not intentionally chosen. For your first FS game I suggest leaving nomads and (to a lesser extent) civilian leaders off.

On cloaked ships: the AI knows which planet they are on, but it can't shoot at them until they are revealed.

Sorry to hear the SSBs disappointed. They used to be pretty powerful in AI hands but nerfs ensued

If you're looking for a unit that takes some learning to properly use but can really help with the early/mid game (before things get to the point where whole caps of ships disappear in the opening seconds of a battle), I suggest the Neinzul Firefly.

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Do Data Centers count as player-controlled in some obscure way? I don't understand why the AI triggered a reprisal 1 wave after I killed one. And this was at the start of a session, in which I hadn't lost anything yet. To the extent that it might have been waiting, carrying over from my previous session, I don't think I'd done anything other than wave defense on my own worlds for a while...

I'm starting to rethink this whole 8+ idea. Looks like wave size, frequency, and trigger threshold for reprisal waves scales *very* sensitively with difficulty level. AIP 75 at Diff-8 gives waves that were larger than AIP 160 at Diff-7 (right before the second homeworld assault), and much more frequently as well. And pretty much any loss larger than a scout seems to trigger a reprisal. So difficulty 8 has been "wave defense: the game" for the most part, which isn't very interesting. Not difficult yet, but if I'm constantly defending or cleaning out the threat fleet (aka wave remnants that retreated), I'm not actually accomplishing anything. Is this why the mysterious 7.3 and 7.6 difficulty settings exist, to help fine tune a middle ground in the wave size and frequency scaling?

My other headache looks to be an issue of getting very lucky with the map in game 1. I've been surprised by the wall of mk3/4 worlds at range 2 from the homeworld, but after a bunch of test starts with lower fog of war settings, that actually seems pretty normal at 7 or 8. Another argument for keeping the champion enabled, I guess - my latest attempt was without one, and trying to get anywhere against that wall with mk2 Raid Starships and/or Zenith Bombards was very slow and often expensive. This could be why I was so unimpressed with the SSBs, since there was no alternative but to send the five mk1s against a mk3 world. Though giving them a decent multiplier against Medium would definitely have helped too, at least let them knock down tachyon posts quickly and easily.

I saw the Neinzul Firefly as an ARS option in the Nomad game. Looks interesting, I'll keep an eye out for it when I try a Neinzul themed game. Presumably with the mixed wave option on so that they're not negated by missile frigate waves.

I'm starting to rethink this whole 8+ idea. Looks like wave size, frequency, and trigger threshold for reprisal waves scales *very* sensitively with difficulty level. AIP 75 at Diff-8 gives waves that were larger than AIP 160 at Diff-7 (right before the second homeworld assault), and much more frequently as well. And pretty much any loss larger than a scout seems to trigger a reprisal. So difficulty 8 has been "wave defense: the game" for the most part, which isn't very interesting. Not difficult yet, but if I'm constantly defending or cleaning out the threat fleet (aka wave remnants that retreated), I'm not actually accomplishing anything. Is this why the mysterious 7.3 and 7.6 difficulty settings exist, to help fine tune a middle ground in the wave size and frequency scaling?

You may have seen it already, but if you're having trouble defending against waves, may I recommend looking at Kahuna's excellent Guide? The section on Defense gives a lot of very useful tips on organizing your planet's turrets, mines, etc, more maximum efficiency.

Yep, I've been setting up Kahuna-style defenses since Game 1. Great stuff!

The attempt I'm not sure about continuing suffers from rather poorly placed wormholes. The home station is in the middle of the system, surrounded by five wormholes (at this point two hostile) at fairly modest range. One of the other two exposed systems still has two hostile wormholes at about 90d angles from each other, with one pretty close to the station. Eventually I planned on taking that system but haven't gotten to it yet, partly from the treadmill of "I've just cleaned up after the last waves, oh look new waves" and partly from "wow waves are already big, do I *really* want 20 more AIP for a nothingburger system right now?"

Ah, digging around in the wiki clarifies the wave sizes. I think the game 1 AIs both had wave multipliers of 1.00 (technically "? ? ?" - Chivalric and Cowardly), while the Game 3b AIs are Experimentalist and Spireling with 1.25 multipliers. Plus an extra multiplier based on difficulty. That explains what I'm seeing. So 7.3-7.6 would have the same final multiplier of 2.5, but would be back to scaling as AIP rather than as AIP^1.1.

Not sure about the timing though. The wiki says "the fewer the number of planets that can be hit with a wave the more the AI will tend to pick longer times between waves". But Game 3b has three exposed planets out of four, and very frequent waves, while Game 1 in the end had seven exposed planets out of eleven, and the waves had longer delays between them.